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Brief Non-requied Introduction
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This should be the END ALL BE ALL document for loading ACX100/ACX111 drivers onto your Gentoo System for your Texas Instruments ACX CardBus/PCI chipset based cards. This may work on other distro's (RedHat, Fedora, Mandrake, OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, ...?) but I have not tested it...yet[?] If anyone can confirm whether these instructions are accurate on other distro's, would greatly appreciate it. Please include any hoops you had to jump through, special instructions or modifications.

Note - This document may not be of any use to you. This may not work! I welcome all corrections/updates etc.

I'm fairly new to Gentoo/Linux in general but I have a lot of history using FreeBSD. I'm trying to diversify more and further my *n?x knowledge. I installed Gentoo on an old Dell Inspiron 8100 (PIII, 256MB RAM, 20GB drive) following the instructions on:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/2005.1/handbook-x86.xml?full=1
for a networkless based installation. The installation went swell! To be sure I covered my bases, I used the `genkernel all` approach however I highly recommend you take the 'make menuconfig' path to manually fine tune the kernel to your needs! If you are not comfortable with messing with the kernel, please choose the former versus the latter.

I spent a lot of time searching on Google for assistance in getting my Linksys WPC54Gv2 WiFi card to work in Linux without the aid of Ndiswrapper. I found countless sites all of which used different drivers and loaded them in many different ways. I tried a few different methods, mixed and matched with no results.

AGAIN - THIS SHOULD BE THE END ALL BE ALL DOCUMENT FOR THIS!
An extra special 'Thank You' goes to Pat Erley - this would NOT have been possible without him.

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Step Zero: Undoing What You Might've Already Tried to Do
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***IF you tried a or a few other methods of loading the acx drivers, and did not succeed, you may have acx & acx_pci, loaded. First, you have to unload them:

This is because you had 2 modules loaded trying to access the same hardware. If you get that, just make sure its not in /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 and reboot the system then go from here.

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First off confirm the following:
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Confirm you have a running Gentoo machine
Make sure you are running a kernel greater than 2.6.11; I'm running 2.6.12-gentoo-r6
Confirm you have configured our kernel for CardBus:

Rule of thumb (i think...): If you run `lspci` and it shows your network device then your pcmcia slots are functioning - So if you run that then I guess you can skip the above, no? I just wanted to document it for completeness.

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Identifying and verifying your cards identity.
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Confirm your pcmcia slots are functioning and that it can communicate with the card:

Once again, the last one there is my WiFi card. Note the 104c:9066 in that line, that is the chipset (right[?]) As far as I know, these are the three possible choices of chipsets for these kinds of cards:

Go this site and follow the instructions
http://acx100.erley.org/howto.txt
*Note - You will notice that the documentation tells you to download the fw.tar.bz2 file from that same site. If you try, it will fail. I highly recommend you go here, http://acx100.sourceforge.net/download.html and maybe check out the mirror (*hint*hint*).
I also read the accompanying README file in the acx-20060215.tar.bz2 file and performed the following steps:

*NOTE - those are back ticks (` `) not to be confused with single quotes (' '). Back ticks are the lower-case version of the tilde (~) key which is to the left of the number 1 key on your desktop keyboard. Laptop users: Your tilde/back tick (~/`) key may be located elsewhere on the keyboard so pay close attention! Those back ticks allow you include the results of a command within a command. So basically, the above lines are the equivalent to:

As they did an excellent job documenting their steps and doing quite a bit of leg work.

By writing this document, am I saying their documentation is bad, faulty or anything like that: No. It was a very good read & appeared to be thorough but it just didn't work for me. I must add: My document may not work for you!
I will [try to] edit/update this as necessary.
Please post and pm or aim me with any changes/suggestions.

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To Do List...
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Confirm these instructions work on WPC54Gv1, 3 and 4 cards
Confirm these instructions work with any/all acx1xx cards
Confirm the instructions on http://acx100.sourceforge.net/wiki/ACX will work (I'm sure they do...)
Add instructions for connecting to WEP encrypted networks
Investigate ability to connect to WPA-TPIK based encryption networks

Hey Tim and Quincy: I'll do some research this week/weekend to see how to get WPA-TPIK setup. I my router is too old for WPA I think but I'll double check for an updated firmware and see if it supports it. I don't use WEP at the house but I'll get it going and get it all confirmed. I can tell you for a fact that you can do something like...

key/enc[ryption]
Used to manipulate encryption or scrambling keys and security mode.
To set the current encryption key, just enter the key in hex digits as XXXX-
XXXX-XXXX-XXXX or XXXXXXXX. To set a key other than the current key,
prepend or append [index] to the key itself (this won't change which is the
active key). You can also enter the key as an ASCII string by using the s:
prefix. Passphrase is currently not supported.
To change which key is the currently active key, just enter [index] (without
entering any key value).
off and on disable and reenable encryption.
The security mode may be open or restricted, and its meaning depends on the
card used. With most cards, in open mode no authentication is used and the
card may also accept non-encrypted sessions, whereas in restricted mode only
encrypted sessions are accepted and the card will use authentication if
available.
If you need to set multiple keys, or set a key and change the active key,
you need to use multiple key directives. Arguments can be put in any order,
the last one will take precedence.
Examples :
iwconfig eth0 key 0123-4567-89
iwconfig eth0 key [3] 0123-4567-89
iwconfig eth0 key s:password [2]
iwconfig eth0 key [2]
iwconfig eth0 key open
iwconfig eth0 key off
iwconfig eth0 key restricted [3] 0123456789
iwconfig eth0 key 01-23 key 45-67 [4] key [4]

I hope this helps (assuming you didn't know how to do it to begin with)_________________------
A network is only as secure as the admin makes it.

I'm having a problem getting my PCI acx111 card going. I used to have it working with this driver but that was a long time ago.
My dmesg says its looking for tiacx111cFF. Which seems to be different from everyone elses. It then procedes to load tiacx111 and try to load that.